ACME Internet Services LLC dba Born Consultants

Business Technology and Information Security focused Consulting for businesses of all industries and sizes for over almost 25 years now! According to our partners, vendors, and clients we have had the longest standing accredited specialization designated by the largest by market share, revenue and market cap vendors in the channel where our unique skills working within SMB's and SME's located in the Midwest as we started out as one of these ourselves. After our 1st decade of operations and continued entrepreneurial build it vs. buy it mentality to invest into bleeding edge services and partner tracks (invite only beta) to stay ahead of the competition and own our own piece of the Internet, Offer VoIP, Hosting and our own Service Provider Cloud while taking the extra mile to ensure the security of our clients data and fraud prevention while other company's choose not to spend the 5c or less to process your credit cards for identity theft protection, use the least resource intensive required encryption and data storage allowing attackers to obtain your person info and your youngest children's which has and is being used to this day in the most common identity theft through hybrid attacks with their SSN, but another name or address for example. We started with professional web design and security as a free value add as it was always our passion and as the other company's and industries evolved and a continued International presence with approx. 35% of our customers being from the EU mostly the UK and English speaking trade regions, while blocking at the highest levels of the Internet areas known with bad actors such as China and Russia along with network used for illegal activity from being accessible from those who chose to use our DNS, Routing, Certificate Authorities and other updates such as BGP while other choose to look the other way and allow these large fraud accounts and activities to go through their services and keep them accessible due to the high profits one could make and just take it down if legal suits persisted and/or the fraud was eventually detected and they weren't large enough for reimbursement for security and policy compliance that the major merchant accounts/credit processor and insurance guarantee's would find a way out of the agreements usually just updating the terms as we and clients of our white label service experienced, but we found a simple policy solution requiring only 1 human interaction to our custom automated approach that allowed us to continue to survive the decades with reoccurring revenue and experience almost 0% churn while also spending on the resources to setup logging and other systems that the FBI and other agencies could access and use to go after the boom of underground of new criminal enterprises as US laws did not require this and has been well known in the ISP industries due to the OpEx and lack of qualified staff along with their customers being many of these groups and just recently has gained some attention during election time. However these are the things that the people we've voted to represent us and is just a consequence of the differences in "ethics" be it businesses, security and others which we have continued to uphold and show through our decisions overtime to put our principals and moral beliefs before profit as the country allows us these freedoms and could only hope that demand and long term relationships would overcome. ​ We have company's known under trade names and others such as ACME Internet Services, LLC, Born Consultants, IT for SMB, Digital Trends and others that technology gave us an edge in the businesses though are/were not technology company's or so we thought at the time with a top event promotion company and marketing services along with management consulting. We've split up into these company's' to structure them around the evolving markets as we still love to provide the best solution and security posture to fit the various industries and synergies each company's majority of similar business needs fit into once security demand increased significantly with regulations and media attention along with contracts working with Big 5 company's and with prime contractors on 1 of the largest networks in the country in addition to multinational demand after the fiscal crisis as EU company's acquired manufacturing facilities and built sales offices in the US heartland while needing a breadth of knowledge across various technology silo's and vendors unknown to many so they could connect to their HQ's and service their own unique needs following best practices and standards that allowed for easy collaboration and hand off to their teams once networks were connected internationally along with e-prescribing and EMR deadlines where various software vendors existed and technical aptitude for configuration lacked along with leadership in large scale deployments where we were able to fill the void and beat the deadlines knowing the technology and operations for deployment already while keeping costs low adopting systems and processes we had come up with a year before. Our goal is and always will be to provide the best possible solution for each customer's business at affordable prices w/o sacrificing the skillsets in technology and business without choosing a vendor just because that is where the best promotions for the VAR and sales team come from and in most cases we use SA's/SE's that also implement their designs and margin on the hardware/software is 0 or limited where required by the channel and will work with your existing vendor if they are able to get lower pricing as we all have to use the same playbooks and know the pricing specials and kickbacks to each vendor and level partner that allows us to vet your vendors if desired at the same time and see if sales or being tied to a small group of vendors is driving their solutions and give you insight into how the industry works and the pricing you've received along with the project outcome was worth it and in your best interest. Also by having consultants/SA's/SE's implement their own solutions prevents them from selling what they know or what happens all to often where buzzwords and trendy "new" products are repackaged and sold based on CapEx or #'s that won't apply to your businesses especially where we are in the cycle now the company's products and heavy discounts leave you calling a company that no longer exists or is in the middle of M&A talks and trying to boost sales for a higher offer leaving you with a product that likely if price was the most important factor when the refresh cycle comes you'll end up with the company you were dissatisfied with in the past answering the phone lines and many other headaches as they push you to their version and pricing of the brand along with the proprietary parts of their product and the SME's having jumped ship or working on integrating it to work through a cloud or API solution to work with their high cost interface and management tool that you wanted to avoid. This is where we come in and take it and our long standing risk management approach to assessing your businesses and best overall solution and road maps. For the SMB/SME projects we've always worked on a per project rate vs. the overbudget and project times are frequently exceeded with many other company's and further expenses when the solution was more of a band aid and your billed for "support" which in most cases this has always been a part of your agreements and they are just calling the vendor you pay a maintenance fee too and really should only need to contact your VAR for an RMA since 20+ years ago I didn't feel it was reasonable to bill while I'm learning what I should already know or for well known issues/bugs if one had experience with the solutions parts and expertise in technology as a whole, just like if a car was bought and it failed early in ownership and the same problem appeared frequently in the same model is that an expense or brand you want to have or is their likely a defect in need of a recall? Not always left with a choice for many of us you probably had to get it repaired and decide on brand loyalty for the longer term or not depending the the qualifications you were seeking in the 1st place before purchasing. ​ This was/is common place in IT as many of the places started out as local PC repair shops selling support contracts to businesses, whether the hit or miss on their businesses lasted maybe regional as in the region we did not offer support asides from anything related to our initial Website designs or 1st Infrastructure deployments for company's and knowing I didn't come from place that friends or family had any business experience or capital to risk and college was on me to make a way if I wanted to go (I did County Fair Grandstands, Paper Routes and took the extra $1 to manage peers and older at 16 for the largest Fast Food company and a trusting franchise owner skirting corp. policy on age while still doing the other jobs as the DOL limits hours on a single employer for minors kept a 4.0 w/ tech offers at largest insurance company and others in the region as I did Web and Network competitions and vocational school vs. graduating early and pivoted into technology that last year after seeing the opportunity that law had, but the expenses and primary skillset I enjoyed were used in both) after a paperwork mistake on housing was made and told the last hours of orientation I wasn't so happy that I'd have to wait as time seemed so long and I did whatever I could to try to gain an edge early to be on par with those that had resources available to them that I knew would be an even larger challenge when landing on contract/business law, which still would be an option as MCD University for management transferred as general business credits which was always rumored but info was lacking however the Internet was a great research tool and MIS was technology and business majors so well worth the effort even if I ended up going local due to the housing issue last minute and started at the leading Insurance Technology Software company FT with classes at night and a growing business consulting from word of mouth, professors and seeing how all the kids with storefronts and shops that their family owned real-estate or signed for needed architect and engineering knowledge from project they sold, but couldn't fulfill they'd find a way to get in touch as I was working on building Wireless Service Providers and a New Network for the New High School in my old district where the local shop owner's dad was on the board and an Apple fan had tracked me down for a different project, but having been a Sr. Systems Engineer already and just finishing up migrating all the clients off Netware to Windows 2000 Domains and Spearheading a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Department for Agency's that Sales could close if our product was a bit less on the CapEx side while we also were moving away from Citrix Metaframe due to IP patents expiring that MSFT would benefit from greatly and remote Insurance Agents instead paying for the extra remote server software and licenses per user when RDP could now use 2 small features that made it less confusing to users having 2 desktops once the new server release would come out while also working with our inhouse team on the upcoming ASP version of our product which today would be called a Cloud or SaaS as they wanted someone to try and break it or into other agency's data and assess a few other areas of major weakness that plague MSFT to this day, albeit not for much longer as backwards compatibility vulnerabilities they've continued to leave up to system admins to mitigate and get OS's current or having to make the effort to enable the risk, most of which appears lost when hiring individuals that haven't built infrastructure or original code monolithic or not as how are they supposed to defend something they've rarely used or had experience with all the bugs and real world issues that generally aren't covered in certifications likely because it wouldn't be great marketing or a good look to those starting out with a book of errors especially if the next guy doesn't list theirs that might hurt their sales just a bit. ​ Regardless as more people with repair shops needed Cisco and Security knowledgeable individuals along with getting in over their heads as most of the owners were less technical and more sales and had funding or resources to cosign for them I did see things early on that didn't sit well which mostly was the morale and late payments to staff and smaller vendors along with other banking/tax issues and a lot of customers only returning angry where I ended up purchasing a home with using it as a SOHO in mind as the CSP/SP businesses services would start out in a server cage in house, but end up in colo's and DC's for connectivity and other obvious reasons and with the top vendors reaching out to be in the initial trials of the SMB specialized partners among security and wireless as well, they provided press releases and MDF funds and the school district project that my friend had clearly was beyond anything he had done before and having mentored a few people that wanted to learn and came to the SOHO with racks of equipment and domains they could work on some live PoC for early VoIP convergence and WiFi voice on SIP to offer with wireless ISP coverage or using Verizon's EDVO network to VPN into the DC's I had and back to the Voice Systems that Converged with PSTN's in house also working, though their engineers said they'll just block it if I tried to take them on with Voice over Wifi using their data network which I had figured and that would just have to play its course for them to make their money with cellular phones starting to enter mainstream. Google Fi seems to have done it finally not that it was hard to build rather the legal and a way to get tower access against tier 1 networks didn't seem reasonable without major backing, but proved valuable learning it and working with SIP before it was actually accepted or finished, but Cisco's 95% market share and rather ingenious capabilities with MSFT CRM integration if you had the resources and then all the other components and pricing being out of reach for most company's their propriety MCGP protocol to bring it all together data, voice, and video on top of early PoE being proprietary and the switching realm changing to l3 and Gig at the access layer were all large expenses and most of their innovations they seemed to make an RFC version for if it was picked up and popular asides from EIGRP for those familiar with real routing and how things came to be know how that could be a real pain with OSFP as the other option and Cisco's early dominance on the Internet as we ran BSD boxes to do a lot of our BGP and ASN# routing for our IP blocks and services due to cost and security like Snort being opensource ironically owned by them now though. Maybe it is just how I learn, but the networking books and certifications always had me confused regardless of the score on the exams as a lot of what they covered they seemed to fail and explain a lot of it was already history and dealt with connections specific to telco's which varied by regions and that class A B C networks was essentially outdated and testing was multicast range since they had to have already known ethernet and CIDR/super netting and so forth had already won just like with packet switching and circuit switching and different connection types that I'm not sure where the ATM 54 Mbps connections are out here, just ATM and banking backbones is the closest I've come to them. Much like fiber where very few knew anything about it when put in front of them or that the 10 Mb ethernet convertors for fiber runs could run 10 Gb and up when switching upgrades or network modules with the port type of choice would work with it and get rid of the silly half duplex and major collisions across manufacturing plants where an admin has 10.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 or \16 was used to connect offices with fractional T'1s and less then 15 users at most sites and ICS/SCADA and other systems plugged in running RIP were unknown to anyone just as properly design network had 4 types of MM fiber connectors being used on GBIC's and SFP's from the MDF to the Access Layer and always SFP to IDF's as we were ripping and replacing for E-rate, but CCNP's had no idea about fiber. ​ of measuring twice and cutting once and building your foundation on rock instead of sand. (with the exception being tied to custom developed software or projects we would refer to our enterprise consulting arm where interstate/country designs and/or regulatory compliance and/or reactive situations involving forensic analysis before mitigation and acceptable risks are reviewed for your businesses where a proper solution can then be decided on) ​ This includes Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), Cloud Service Provider (CSP), and overall solution providers for your unique businesses needs be it a single office, 10 Office locations in a few mile radius along with Int'l Branch locations, and/or maybe your location is Regional Sales Office/Manufacturing Site/Call Center/Agriculture/Warehousing/Logistic's Site/Healthcare/REIT or a Technology Startup to a top 5 International Airline we have worked with businesses if all types and sizes and can offer solutions along with design them along with your business road map when/where needed. With all of the Partnership's and Company's M&A along with the Technology boom going full steam (we've been through 1 tech bubble really 2 where mistakes were made by company's again and again and this time around we see many Firms failing to provide guidance on some of the risks we've seen time and time again along with something that really needs to be thought about and assessed as a potential risk when decision are being made for 1st Digital Transformation's or anything that is going to apart of your company's framework or road map moving forward and not repeat pain points of the past, many of which company's are just finding or realizing, but there is little public data out there about these. Likely because selling you false solutions, that require you to by this newer shinier solution to go with it, replace it or just to keep up with the competition all while billing you with more hours and in the past VAR model's generally hardware, where as today this is by far more of a software or as a service offering we're seeing, which mean easier company startup's and basic OpEx,, but there is no real way to know how this company will work to improve you company and if they'll even be there when you need them most? Many don't realize that these company's are running at huge cash burn rates year over year and have never profited and either have a massive debit load or are burdened to Google Cloud or other, which we are partners with and use it where it makes sense, the funny thing with this is, the majority of it makes sense in this region, but only at the core of the offerings, which were around a decade and 2 decades ago, though just not as accessible due to connectivity, which honestly is still the same for a lot of districts outside of Chicago's office suburbs, but there are solutions that don't just say 1000Mbps or Gigabit, but fail to tell you that they have an added latency and are going over terribly designed networks that can't handle the traffic you need at you main location and maybe a new ICS at a manufacturing site, which has invested heavily in a SCADA system to work with the ICS devices, set point data collection and other information to optimize production operations and now have decided to take on IoT to this existing solution and build out an even more advanced production line along with analytic's be it Low Orbit Satellite/Video As a Service/Drone's or other technologies in the new IoT world that will give you better over site of how the harvest is coming for the day across IL/IN and other locations in which seeing the conditions and measures are available at cost unsought likely to have ever been possibly before. This still doesn't do company's any good when these far off locations are still using Bell or AT&T copper lines from the original monopoly and its break up, even if the company selling you the solution calls it Copper Over Ethernet or the latest satellite Internet deployed with 500 sat's in approx. a year as some may have seen a launch on TV, where as in Y2K the # pf NGO Defense related Sat's wasn't very many to what was put up really in a few weeks of launches, but that doesn't mean the network is going to work for your needs either, but sales will still sell based on that theory or thought. Latency for your HD video feeds that have to go from each site to the Sat's and Back to receiving stations and then to your location over the internet, well with a giant buffer and way to make it TCP vs. standard UDP which is best effort for all that bandwidth that in the billions of packets per hour you lose 1% and its using fancy prefix added to algorithm that will mean the data transfers are only of moving or objects changing or where you have PTZ and need to do so, otherwise the rest of it like the Internet itself is generally cached already to get things to go faster as it still is being built and very difficult to make everyone upgrade their roads and highway's to the right technology's and pavement or standards even as it wasn't a project that everyone started together for free! Can't cut off Fortune 500 company's from old main frames, just like you can't get these older ISP's to change to a specific vendor/brand which uses the best standards making it all very complex and the technology's with fancy buzz words, usually useless especially because most aren't implemented correctly or approved and eventually fail to work, plus in the example great so the 1% pack loss were missing 1 of 100 faces that the algo saved you in data of the surroundings that weren't changing from being resent, but you also lost the key video frame you needed, regardless of how fast the new connections are and for a hit about improved security with 5G well they kind of blew that one already. It was left optional and only works to fix the old issues where just about anyone with a phone and software can intercept you calls similar to the devices the FBI and other LEA's use called Sting Ray's and you generally none the wiser, encryption or not. Why is this, one may wonder? We'll by making the encryption and mitigation techniques used in the standard make it possible to mitigate the known risk as optional, but also require end to end in the technology is the problem. This like most areas of tech requires that your phone manufacture, the modem chip maker in it, the software one it, the app being used, then the technology your device connects to either WiFi or 5G Small Cell's, all have to have this exact same setting enabled and set with compatible settings and also be built with the hardware in the technology to begin with and also extra bandwidth to accommodate the extra packets this would use which means faster hardware and so forth. Then throw in all the different vendors, software and carriers networks, not to mention the networks that connect those with physical wires and the other user having to have a 5G comparable device as the 4G LTE Cell's won't be updated to handle this, where the standard should have just made it a part of it vs. making it optional and something you may have to turn on yourself anyway given the above from a networking viewpoint, but these are mistakes that you want company's to help you avoid like the Fortune 500 company's running on technology from pre Y2K and on Intel ITanium Processor's which Intel though would be their bread winner and spent the most on its development, yet the x86 was the winner even if the other is/was better for some workload, but not those of the desktop PC and 64 bit was early or to costly for most back then. Yet Microsoft and Intel will be just tis year doing the EOL or end of life, really sales in this case, this year for the processor's and the OS supported Microsoft Server's since a few fortune company's or occasional just 1 is enough to get monster company's like Microsoft to keep making a separate version of its code and updates just like they still do for XP if your one of these company's needing it with deep pockets, because of how difficult it really is to change certain functions of your business if it grows or at least the time and risk along with the risk of picking the technology company you want to survive as if your a company of that size your account alone will likely ensure this will be the case as long as your a customer since it takes years to decades to migrate all of database information without going offline, if it works that is, so they just don't, but you don't have the fairly larger annual percentage to keep support for these clients only to receive support and if your not at least 10k licenses or more, your generally looked at last from withing the largest vendors at least. Since this is the way of tech and software not being an industry I see there being a need for 50 different account applications and generally the largest of the company's being the one's that will get the say so in what will last as they will make you change your EDI data format to work with theirs if you want to grow your business to work with them, why not work with a company that knows this and isn't going to get you to buy stuff you don't need in the IoT world that isn't proven and from company's that have the financials and clients to last. while also having been around long enough to see this happen again an again, to us the most, but that is because we spend the extra time and money partnering with extra company's just to make sure we know the best possible solutions and solution road map to get you to where you want to go, vs the company with the biggest kickback for putting you on their products Not to mention in the past shortly after y2k, when Cisco and Microsoft started to focus on the SMB and SME markets they chose use to be one of a few to lead the development of these programs, likely due to regional coverage and businesses in the Midwest and in and around Chicago, but this at least gives us a long standing relationship with these company's and a voice, even if we work with enterprise and focus on LOB and Security now that the demand is there where our passion has always been, especially with security, it is just an added bonus clients have received as we've always looked and treated this and business development as core to a solutions success. Two things we can promise you that will continue to be a major pain point for company's moving forward in really what is business technology and security going on now, which we had originally believed and marketed from our start as a part of our core value over others.